gasoline to smuggle. We would leave our ancestors' land, but there is nowhere to go. Even the pygmies live better than us. We must have money. We must be strong. We have no choice. It is strength or death. You understand?" He sounds almost guilty.
The captives stare at him dully. He nods shortly, as if he has explained everything, and looks up to the western sky. Patrice produces lengths of mudstained yellow rope and begins to go among the captives, binding their arms behind them as he did in the jungle. Veronica cries out as the rope tightens on her scabbed wrists, but she doesn't resist. There doesn't seem to be any point. Her fate seems preordained.
Once they are roped together again, into two groups of four, their ankle chains are removed and piled beside Gabriel. The man in the dishdash walks among the captives, examining them carefully, as if looking for flaws. Veronica's shoulders and wrists are hurting again, she wishes their chains had not been replaced by ropes.
She hears a faint and familiar noise, the distant buzz of an approaching helicopter. Hope soars in her heart as she thinks of the UN helicopter they saw. But the buzzing aircraft that crests the hill, moving straight towards them like some gigantic June bug, is painted black, not UN white.
As the helicopter nears its noise becomes incredible, deafening. Its rotors are like smeared halos. Crops ripple as it passes low above the fields, and the wind it generates is gale-force, Veronica has to lean forward to stay upright as the helicopter stoops and lands in the bean field before them. The rotor wash crushes the nearby plants flat.
A watchful part of her mind notes the aircraft's streaked and peeling paint, the fading Cyrillic letters stencilled on its nose. The pilot is a white man, unrecognizable behind a helmet and bulky radio headset. The passenger compartment is occupied by three rusting metal benches. A man in a dishdash, holding one of the rifles with wooden handles and curved ammunition clips - a Kalashnikov, according to Derek - sits alone in the back row.
The engine noise abates to a dull roar. The man with the Thuraya phone shakes hands formally with Gabriel. Then he produces a pistol from his billowing robe. The captives are pushed up onto the helicopter, forced to sit on the two front metal benches. The two dishdash men sit behind them. Veronica is between Jacob and Derek in the foremost bench. She feels dizzy, and not just from sickness, or the powerful smells of rust and gasoline. This all feels so unreal.
The engine roar intensifies, swells into a pounding howl that seems to drown out all possible thought. Veronica tries to brace her legs against the steel wall in front of her. Her muscles have no strength in them. Then the aircraft lurches like an earthquake, they rise with sickening speed, and Veronica barely manages to lean over before vomiting onto the rusting floor.
She feels a little better when she sits up straight again. The aircraft pulses with the beat of its engine, rattling her bones inside her body, provoking all her wounds and blisters anew, and the wind blowing through the helicopter's open sides and broken windows is freezing, but at least her head has cleared somewhat. Beneath them the Congo is a rolling green carpet. They are flying northwest, low to the ground, following the contours of the hills and valleys. When they crest the hills, she can see the snowcapped Ruwenzori mountains to their right, their peaks mostly hidden by a dense curtain of crowds; and further south, behind and to the right, the jagged Virunga volcanoes. Under other circumstances the panoramic view would be exhilirating.
They fly over tiny communities, clusters of mud huts hidden in the valleys of these rolling hills, connected by a network of red dirt trails like capillaries. Once they cross a larger road, big enough for two-way traffic, but only a few burnt-out wrecks are visible. Then for some time there is nothing, an endless, undifferentiable ocean of green hills carved by winding, silvery rivers. Only the occasional tin roof winking in the sunlight, or the sight of a canoe in a river, indicates that the land beneath them is at all inhabited. Veronica remembers reading that three million people have died in the lands below them over the last ten years, victims of civil war and anarchy. It is a terrifying thought.
The helicopter follows the path of a river